London
Adam Sweeting
It’s quite bold to create a multiracial comedy set in Hackney in the early Eighties, a not especially amusing period of riots, the Falklands War and Thatcherism. Happily, Hackney boy Idris Elba has managed it with a wry eye and a light comic touch.This Hackney isn’t the lethal drug-saturated combat zone portrayed in Top Boy, but an altogether more genial place where black, white and Asian residents rub along fairly comfortably, and manage to find ways to cope with non-PC attitudes. “We were thicker-skinned back then,” Elba has commented.Naturally, it’s Elba’s character Walter Easmon who’s at Read more ...
Laura de Lisle
Arinzé Kene is having a bit of a moment. He won an Evening Standard Film Award for The Pass opposite Russell Tovey in 2016, is about to appear in a BBC drama with Paddy Considine, and has just finished lending his lovely tenor to Conor McPherson’s Girl from the North Country in the West End. He’s somehow also had time to write Misty, directed by Omar Elerian at the Bush Theatre, at once a powerful meditation on how we tell stories and a raw, beautiful Odyssey through the heart of London. Clocking in at a tight two hours, Misty begins, true to its title, with a lot of fog. A thick green Read more ...
Liz Thomson
The delicious flame-grilled burgers and the vast array of bourbons on offer at the Lexington, hard by yet another “King's Cross Quarter”, added atmosphere to the opening night of Diana Jones’s European tour. Finger licking is (quite rightly) not allowed during the music so those arriving early for a bite might have spotted Jones herself, refuelling with friends between sound-check and curtain-up.Not that the singer-songwriter called variously “the Emily Dickinson of song” and “the female Johnny Cash” needs props of any kind. In venues far larger than the Lexington, Jones creates the kind of Read more ...
Jasper Rees
They don’t commission many television documentaries like Being Blacker (BBC Two) any more. That is not unconnected to the fact that Molly Dineen downed her camera a decade ago. Dineen began filming in another age, before the arrival of kiss-me-quick multi-channel digiverse, and has kept to the habits she learned back then - to observe and probe her subject over months or even years, wielding her own camera. Those habits are expensive and time-consuming and result in richly detailed films like this which tell an epic story on a miniature canvas.The title refers to Steve Burnett-Martin, better Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
David Bailey taught Nureyev to dance at the Ad Lib club in London in the Sixties. “He was very stiff. He could do all that Swan Lake stuff but he couldn’t do the twist,” remembers Bailey in one of My Generation’s voiceover interviews, some vintage, some in conversation today.Directed by David Batty and presented by Michael Caine – the film was his friend and producer Simon Fuller’s idea, inspired by Caine’s anecdotes – with a script by Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais, it features great archival footage of those glory days when London swung and everyone smoked. Who can resist Twiggy giggling Read more ...
Katherine Waters
Lisa Halliday’s striking debut novel consists of three parts. The first follows the blooming relationship between Alice and Ezra (respectively an Assistant Editor and a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer) in New York; the middle section comprises a series of reflections narrated by Amar, an American-Iraqi while he is held in detention at Heathrow en route to see his brother in Iraqi Kurdistan. The final third consists of a transcript of Ezra’s Desert Island Discs recorded some years later.The book focusses on how power imbalances inflect relationships. This is quite clear when Alice’s giddy Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Workrate of the Week award goes to Lennie James, who not only stars in this new six-part drama but wrote and executive-produced it as well. James (who starred in the first series of Line of Duty, and has hit it big in The Walking Dead) plays the central character Nelly Rowe, a wily chancer living on a Deptford council estate who suddenly finds his chequered past catching up with him.We soon learn that a little of Nelly can go a long way, not least his slightly laboured geezer-slang – “things are gonna get a touch fuckin’ chronic”, “I dunno why you’re getting all secret squirrel about it” etc Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
London Rules – explicitly cover your arse – is the fifth in the most remarkable and mesmerising series of novels, set mostly and explicitly in London, to have appeared in years. It is hypnotically fascinating, absolutely contemporary, cynical and hopeful.The style is utterly Herron’s own: a series of elegant vignettes, a few short paragraphs, covering just a few days of mad and often deluded action. He fields a large cast of characters, from Jackson Lamb, the omniscient, obese, flatulent, greedy mess of an experienced, now disgraced MI5 spy, and his crew of much younger men and women who have Read more ...
graham.rickson
Director Alex Barrett’s wordless London Symphony is a conscious throwback to the silent "city symphonies" of the 1920s, specifically Walter Ruttmann’s 1927 Berlin - Symphony of a Great City. You’re also reminded of Terence Davies’s Of Time and the City and Patrick Keillor’s discursive Robinson trilogy, though these feature narrators.Mostly monochrome and made in close collaboration with composer James McWilliam, London Symphony grew out of a silent short about Hungerford Bridge. Just a little longer than an hour, it’s divided into four themed movements, in Barrett’s words “an optimistic Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It says something about the state of television that sooner or later every actor has to play a cop or a spy. Latest in line is Carey Mulligan, starring as DI Kip Glaspie in David Hare’s new four-parter Collateral.This is, on the face of it, a thriller. The wheels of detection spun into action after the puzzling death of Abdullah Asif, a pizza delivery man who’d just delivered a quattro formaggi to harassed mother of two, Karen Mars (Billie Piper). Karen indignantly pointed out that the pizza in question lacked its requested additional topping, though this did not prove to be the motive for Read more ...
David Nice
Very well, so ENO's latest Gilbert and Sullivan spectacular was originally to have been The Gondoliers directed by Richard Jones and conducted by Mark Wigglesworth. But that Venetian fantasia has already been seen at the Coliseum in recent years, and Iolanthe - which I can't remember experiencing live with a full orchestra since the declining years of the D'Oyly Carte - ranges wider. Sullivan’s spoof of supernatural Mendelssohn/Weber, as dewily beautiful as its sources, meets Gilbert at his multiple-rhyming sharpest in the mésalliance (that word is French) between fairy ladies and Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
McMafia has taught us to recognise one thing – you might call it the “Norton stride”. As the charismatic Alex Godman, James Norton has been advancing, confidently at screen centre, towards one challenge after another, and they have been coming (mildly put) from all sorts of unexpected quarters. He’s dealt with everything by pressing onwards, ignoring advice from all and sundry.Quite who he was propelling ahead to meet at the end of this final episode of Hossein Amini and James Watkins’s series was left a mystery. But if Vladimir Putin himself had slipped into shot, smiling lopsidedly, arm out Read more ...